A Brief Critical Inquiry
In ‘’Religions of Rome: Volume 1, A History‘’ Mary Beard, John North, & Simon Price (1998a, p. 12) states:
[…] Recent work, particularly in archaeology, has cast doubt on the idea of an early, uncontaminated, native strand of genuine Roman religion; and it has suggested that, rather than seeing pure Roman traditions gradually polluted from outside, Roman religion was an amalgam of different traditions from at least as far back as we can hope to go. Leaving aside its mythical prehistory, Roman religion was always already multicultural.
This tendency to absorb other cultures can even be identified in Rome’s founding myths when Romulus—according to Livy (in book 1 of Ab Urbe Condita) and Plutarch (about the Life of Romulus in Parallel Lives)—accepted people from diverse backgrounds (like slaves and fugitives) when the City was still new and growing, or even in Vergil’s Aeneid narrativizing a coherent linear structure of Aeneas escaping Troy and eventually founded Lavinium by intermingling with the local Latin population.
Like many ancient—and even modern—religious traditions, Roman religion was not static, it was always in motion beyond Rome’s pomerium, constantly adapting to its external conditions as Rome’s boundaries kept fluctuating—whether it was expanding, shrinking, or frozen—and intermingled with people of foreign soil and various cultures, even if that intermingling was through trade, diplomacy, and/or conquest.
Haruspicy; the Etruscan ritual practice of divination and reading omens by observing the entrails and liver of animal sacrificial offerings, and Haruspices; the Etruscan priests and ritual specialists, are good examples of the theme of cultural amalgamation in Roman religion. They were not acknowledged as ‘‘fully’’ Roman yet were significant in Roman religious life and tradition (Beard, North, Price, 1998b, p. 175).
In an attempt to understand foreign deities in the context of their own cosmology, Romans would interpret them in parallel with the deities in their own pantheon based on the characteristics they thought were similar. This process of translation is also known as interpretatio romana.
One example being Isis from Egypt whom the Greeks and Romans interpreted as Demeter/Ceres, Hera/Juno, Aphrodite/Venus, or Artemis/Diana. Isis was not only an Egyptian goddess who could be interpretated as Greek and Roman goddesses with similar characteristics, but she herself also had various epithets and manifestations. This reflects that Isis had a highly polysemous nature (Mazurek, 2022, p. 102). Furthermore, the epithets can vary based on specific contexts and characteristics. For example, Isis-Pelagia (of the sea) who was worshipped by sailors, or based on their proximity to another deity; for example, Isis-Fortuna which was a syncretic manifestation of both deities. Her polysemous nature made facilitated the diffusion of her cult. The presence of the Isaic Cult existed in the Ptolemaic Kingdom and even before the annexation of Egypt, her cult came to Italy around late 2nd century BCE where the earliest temples date around 105 BCE and her priesthood—college of pastophoroi—eventually formed in Rome around 80 BCE (Bowden, 2023, p. 193).
Another example being Kybele—a.k.a. Magna Mater—from Phrygia who was also interpreted as Ceres or even Terra Mater. Whereas as the cult of Isis was accepted into the Roman pantheon, Magna Mater and her cult were rather actively sought after by the Romans to be accepted into the Roman pantheon as a prophecy according to the Sibylline Books during a time when Romans sought for answers to ongoing hardships.
Livy (Bowden, 2023, p. 116) wrote: (in Ab Urbe Condita, book 29.10):
About this time [205 BC] a sudden wave of religious concern swept over the citizenry. The Sibylline Books had been consulted because it had rained stones that year more than usual and in the books a prophecy had been found that if ever a foreign enemy should invade Italy, he could be defeated and driven out if the Idaean Mother were brought from Pessinus to Rome.
Furthermore, Kybele was also associated with Mount Ida near the site of Troy which was considered the ancestral land of Aeneas. This detail is also even mentioned in Vergil’s Aeneid (9.80-82).
However, even though Isis and Kybele could be understood as Roman deities—or even sometimes as each other1—they could still be venerated in their own respective cults just like their supposed Roman interpretations, albeit they still went through romanization which deterritorialized them from their own land and culture/people.
In other contexts, certain foreign deities did not have Roman interpretations of themselves (as in interpreting Isis as Ceres) but rather received direct translations and were unambiguously imported. Such examples being Apollo and Asclepius from the Greek pantheon.
However, even such ‘direct’ translations were filtered through elements of 1) interpretatio romana for prioritizing and ignoring certain characteristics from their native cult and 2) romanization through reconstruction of their visual and artistic representations in the style of the Romans.
For example, Apollo was included in Vergil’s Aeneid (an Augustan Epic Poem) and was represented ‘‘as the prophet of Rome’s future greatness.’’ (Agard, 1935, p. 101). In this context, even though Apollo didn’t have a direct translation, he was still adapted into Roman literature, cosmology, and subsequently a nation-building project initiated by Augustus. To complicate things even further, deities like Apollo can go through further adaptations even after being incorporated into other religious traditions and civilizations. Vergil’s depiction of Apollo in the Aeneid (8.703) has also been used as a tool for propaganda embedded with Augustan ideologies framing the narrative of how Apollo ‘‘vouchsafed the climactic battle of Actium for Octavian’’ as per Miller (2004, p. 168). Vergil’s narrativization of Apollo contributing to the Battle of Actium acted also as a strategy of legitimization by appealing to divine will. This version of Apollo portrayed in Augustan literature is also claimed to be known as ‘‘Apollo Palatinus’’ or Apollo Actius’’2 as per Miller (2004, p. 168).
Alternatively, Whilst the Roman Empire was navigating the hardships caused by the Antonine plague (165–180 CE) the Roman state began minting out more coins with the image of Apollo ‘the healer’ (Kennedy, 2024, p. 94) as a response to the spread of the plague by evoking Apollo’s association with disease and medicine. This also exemplifies how cult activity and priorities can vary and fluctuate in reaction to external conditions and circumstances.
ℹ️ Evocatio An example of how foreign deities could have been accepted into Roman culture and religion was Evocatio, a war strategy and ritual performed by Roman generals to ‘persuade’ foreign deities to abandon the settlement and people they were protecting and be welcomed into Rome instead. One historical (and well-known) case is the evocatio of Juno Regina from Veii, an Etruscan city in 396 BCE (Beard, North, Price, 1998, pp. 34-35) and dedicated a temple for her on the Aventine Hill in 392 BCE (Orlin, 2002, p. 1).
Conversely, as a result of outward territorial expansion and subsequent cultural diffusion, Romans could also bring their own deities and syncretize with a local foreign deity using their name as an epithet. One example being Jupiter Dolichenus (Nash-Williams, 1952, p. 72), a syncretic amalgamation of Jupiter with a Hittite-Hurrian deity, from Doliche, in Roman Syria. In this context, instead of a foreign deity adopting a local Roman deity’s name as epithet (as seen with Isis), a deity from Rome has rather syncretized with the local deity in their own land as an attempt to adapt to the boundaries beyond Rome’s borders and perhaps even vernacular contexts of the region.
Alternatively, within the theme of cultural diffusion of Roman religion and adaptation into the local landscape of foreign soil, aspects of Roman religious tradition could also syncretize with the local cultural, religious, and political landscape. After the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE and the eventual conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, Augustus constructed temples in honor of Isis wherein certain reliefs of the temple iconography represented himself as a pharaoh, often standing in front of Isis—and other Egyptian deities—giving offerings. Such reliefs displayed Augustus’ pietas as symbolic representations of appeasement in effort to legitimize authority by perpetuating narratives of succession through romanization of Egyptian temple architecture and iconography representing Egyptian deities) which would also reinforce Roman cultural hegemony. Isis’ association with divine motherhood and relation to her son Horus/Harpocrates—who was also typically understood to be materially represented through the Pharaoh—was also utilized as a political symbol of legitimacy. Additionally, in the Temple of Isis in Dendur, Augustus is represented not only giving offerings to Isis and Egyptian deities like Osiris and Harpocrates, but also to Nubian deities like Pedesi and Pihor (see Stünkel, 2018).
Roman (re)constructions of Isaic temples are solid examples of how religious traditions—including deities—can go through several layers of adaptation where the temples aren’t only adapted into romanized versions of their Egyptian inspirations but temples like Dendur can also include vernacular aspects of the local region.captioDetail depicting Augustus (left) offering milk to Osiris, Isis, and Harpocrates.n...Detail depicting Augustus (left) burning incense and making a libation (a liquid offering) to the deified brothers Pedesi and Pihor (center and right).
Per contra, scholars (Kaizer, 2006, p. 29, Orlin, 2002, p. 2) have also scrutinized the framing of deities—including various aspects of religious traditions—as ‘‘foreign’’ for its wording often being embedded with presuppositions of religious traditions and deities as homogenous standards from their ‘‘native’’ origins (i.e. ‘‘native’’ pantheon or landscape). To elaborate, even though Isis’ ‘‘original’’ or ‘‘native’’ pantheon and landscape may have been Egypt, her cult had already gone through centuries of veneration and iterations (i.e. Isis being associated, syncretized, and venerated alongside other various deities) among Greeks since 5th century BCE (Beard, North, & Price, 1998b, p. 297) until her arrival in Italy around late 2nd century BCE. In addition, Isis’ name can even be found in pyramid texts that trace back to the fifth dynasty around 2494-2345 BCE (Glomb, 2022, p. 7). Isis was not a static deity, even to the Egyptians themselves, and the same logic can be applied to Roman deities as well; furthermore, the same logic can and should also be applied to religious traditions as a whole too. Deities, like their relational religious tradition(s), can be better understood as assemblages that go through perpetual dialectical evolution in relation to their external conditions and circumstances.
Such critical commentaries are crucial to take into consideration because it problematizes rather overgeneralized and oversimplified notions of ‘‘Syncretism.’’ Furthermore, this might even lead one to question the ‘‘nativity’’ of Roman religion itself, which brings us back to the earlier passage by Beard, North, and Price: ‘‘Roman religion was always already multicultural.’’
In a future article I will elaborate upon these recent commentaries by exploring and discussing the reframing of Roman religious tradition as a machinic assemblage to further deconstruct monolithic notions of a homogenous Roman religion.
Reference List
Agard, W. R. (1935). Apollo Polymorphous. The Classical Journal, 31(2), 99–107. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3290818.
Beard, M., North, J., & Price, S. (1998a). Religions of Rome: Volume 1, A History. Cambridge University Press.
Beard, M., North, J., & Price, S. (1998b). Religions of Rome: Volume 2, A Sourcebook. Cambridge University Press.
Bowden, H. (2023). Mystery Cults in the Ancient World. Thames & Hudson.
Glomb, T. (2022). Connecting the Isiac Cults: Formal Modeling in the Hellenistic Mediterranean. Bloomsbury Academic
Kaizer, T. (2006). In Search of Oriental Cults. Methodological Problems concerning “the Particular” and “the General” in near Eastern Religion in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods. Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, 55(1), 26–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4436797.
Kennedy, J. (2024). Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History. Penguin (Transworld).
Miller, J. (2004). Ovid and Augustan Apollo. Hermathena, (177/178), 165–180. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23041546.
Mazurek. L. A. (2022). Isis in a Global Empire: Greek Identity through Egyptian Religion in Roman Greece. Cambridge University Press.
Nash-Williams, V. E. (1952). Iuppiter Dolichenus. Greece & Rome, 21(62), 72–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/640970.
Orlin, E. M. (2002). Foreign Cults in Republican Rome: Rethinking the Pomerial Rule. Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 47, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.2307/4238789.
Further Readings
Burton, P. J. (1996). The Summoning of the Magna Mater to Rome (205 B.C.). Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, 45(1), 36–63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4436406.
Tobin, V. A. (1991). Isis and Demeter: Symbols of Divine Motherhood. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 28, 187–200. https://doi.org/10.2307/40000579.
Stünkel, I. (2018, November 2). The Temple’s Cult and Decoration. Metropolitan Museum. https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/temple-of-dendur-cult-and-decoration.
Footnotes
1 | according to ‘’Hymns to Isis’‘ by Isidorus (in Hymn I, 14-22), Isis was also interpreted as the Mother of the gods by some (specifically Thracians).
All mortals who live on the boundless earth, Thracians, Greeks and barbarians, Express Your fair Name, a Name greatly honoured among all, but Each speak in his own language, in his own land The Syrians call You: Astarte, Artemis, Nanaia The Lycian tribes call You: Leto, the Lady; The Thracians also name You as Mother of the gods And the Greeks call you Hera of the Great Throne, Aphrodite, Hestia the good, Rheia and Demeter.
2 | Apollo Actius is said to have existed since 7th century BCE with the construction of the Temple of Apollo Aktios or Actian Apollo, but his cult rose in popularity under Augustus after the battle of Actium.